Lindy Ruff doesn’t sound worried about Zach Benson’s scoreless start. He sounds convinced the goals are coming.
Ahead of Saturday night’s rematch with the Montreal Canadiens, Ruff was asked about Benson, one of three full-time Sabres forwards - along with Peyton Krebs and Beck Malenstyn - who still hadn’t scored through eight games. Ruff’s answer centered on process, not panic, and on the way Benson keeps landing in the spots that usually lead to goals.
“I look at the body of work that line did last night [in a 5-4 win over the Toronto Maple Leafs]. By far, they're our best line on the ice.
Eventually some of the chances that he had will go. It's like some of the chances Jack Quinn - Jack Quinn probably could have had five goals last night.
He had two goal posts, another great couple of opportunities.
Sometimes that puck comes to you on a line, sometimes it goes to one of your linemates. I think last night most of them were going to Jack.
But we don't score a couple of goals. If you look at the one goal where Benny is on top of the goaltender, I think it was the [Dennis] Gilbert goal.
If you do enough of the right things, he might get one that goes off the shin pad, kind of the same way Ostlund had a goal."
The numbers back up the eye test. Benson has five assists and plenty of Grade A looks already, and he’s sitting second on the Sabres in individual expected goals at 3.81, trailing only Tage Thompson’s 3.91, according to Natural Stat Trick. The 5-foot-10 winger still has work to do as a finisher - he scored 34 goals on 53.2 expected goals across his first three NHL seasons, per NST - but he keeps showing up where damage is done, right at the edge of the crease.
That’s the kind of player who can take a little longer to turn chances into goals, especially if the shot isn’t elite. Buffalo fans have seen a version of that development path before in Sam Reinhart. He managed 40 goals over his first 167 games with the Sabres before becoming a top-end scorer with the Florida Panthers, including a 57-goal season in 2023-24.
Benson may not be headed for that kind of ceiling, but the Sabres clearly believe there’s more scoring in his future. A peak around 30 goals isn’t out of the question, and when that gets paired with his work as a forechecker and backchecker, he profiles as the kind of steady all-around contributor Buffalo can lean on for a long time.
For now, though, the focus is a little simpler: get one Saturday against Montreal.
The line Benson shares with Noah Ostlund and Jack Quinn has been one of Buffalo’s bright spots in a start that’s otherwise been shaped by power-play struggles, penalty-kill issues and uneven goaltending. At 5-on-5, the Sabres have been much stronger, and that trio has been right at the center of it.
Among NHL lines that have logged at least 60 minutes together, Benson-Ostlund-Quinn ranks fifth in expected goal share at 65.3 percent, according to MoneyPuck. The sample is still relatively small, but it’s big enough to matter, especially with the Edmonton Oilers’ top unit of Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Vasily Podkolzin leading the way at 72.2 percent.
That’s part of why Ruff has kept coming back to this group while mixing and matching the rest of his forwards. He’s seen what happens when Benson and Ostlund bring their work rate and Quinn feeds off it. Quinn, who had been something of an enigma before this stretch, looked fully unleashed in Thursday’s win over Toronto and finished with four points.
For Buffalo, the challenge now is finding another line that can come close to matching that kind of 5-on-5 impact. Right now, that’s no easy ask.
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